The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Another 'Occupy' movement has just rocked the United States of America -- but with a very different message.

Tens of thousands of men and women gathered in 146 protests on Friday, joining a grassroots effort that organizers say grew far beyond expectations. The rallies were held to protest the Obama administration mandate forcing religious universities, charities, and other groups to pay for abortifacient drugs and other birth control for students and employees.

But while the purpose of the Occupy protests last fall was sometimes criticized as being somewhat hazy, the message of this event was clear. According to the Friday rallies, the HHS mandate is not a birth control issue, but a religious freedom issue, and a challenge to fight that won't be ignored....

I attended the rally in downtown Chicago and was heartened to see well-behaved people of different ages participating in the event. It's a sign of hope.

A new survey shows a 'noticeable shift' in the opinions of American Catholics regarding the Obama administration's position on religious freedom. Apparently as a result of the clash between the White House and the U.S. bishops' conference on the mandate for contraceptive coverage in health-insurance programs, the number of Catholics who see the Obama administration has unfriendly toward religious freedom has jumped from 15% in August 2009 to 25% in March 2012.

But lest we get too excited:

However, most Americans continued to say that the Obama administration is either friendly toward religion (42%) or neutral (25%), the poll showed Evangelical Protestants and Republicans were most likely to fault the administration for hostility toward religious freedom....

Not to be a total pessimist, but we conservatives are still facing a very-uphill battle. In fact, I fear that only a terrible economy -- yes, it's bad now, but I mean really, really bad -- will make Obama vulnerable enough to lose come November.

[FrontPage Editor’s note: This is the edited transcript of the speech given by David Horowitz at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill on March 12, 2012.]

I want to thank Brandon Hartness, the Committee for a Better Carolina, and Christians United for Israel for inviting me to speak tonight. I wish I had also been invited by Jewish groups on this campus, but the Jewish groups on this campus are in a state of denial when it comes to the threat facing Israel.

The subject of my talk is Israel, but it is really about America as well. Israel is the canary in the mine. When you watch Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, lead tens of thousands of Muslims in Lebanon in chants of “Death to America, death to Israel,” you understand they are linked. When you hear Iran’s dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, lead similar crowds in chants of “Death to Israel, death to America,” you see they are linked. The coiner of the slogan that linked them for the Islamic revolution was the Ayatollah Khomeini, father of the modern Jihad against the West, who called America “The Great Satan” and Israel “The Little Satan.”

When gauging human conflicts it is important to look at people’s intentions. Probably none of you ever wondered why we don’t have missiles pointing towards our northern neighbor, or an army stationed on the Canadian border. That’s because we understand that even though Canadians are often resentful of what they think of as “American imperialism,” their intentions towards us are friendly and benign. We even share a “National Hockey League” with them. If people understood or correctly read Hitler’s intentions in the ‘30s, 70 million lives might have been saved. Hitler systematically violated the International Peace Agreements that were meant to keep Germany from re-emerging as a major aggressive power. Then he took a piece of Czechoslovakia and a piece of Austria, but there were always people in the West, leaders in the West, who said, “We can do business with Hitler, we can negotiate him, we can appease his appetites short of war.” And they were wrong.

The Jews, too, misread Hitler’s intentions. There would be a lot more Jews in the world, if the Jews then had understood the intentions of the Nazis. There were 500,000 Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. But they didn’t think the Germans were going to kill them. They organized themselves to make it easier for the Germans to ship them out to what they thought were work camps. They actually made it easier for the Germans to kill them because they thought the Germans were too civilized to plan to exterminate them. They misread the intentions of the Germans.

So I want to begin this little talk tonight by reading some statements made by Palestinian leaders, which express their intentions towards the Jews. Mahmoud al-Zahar is a founder of Hamas and one of its current leaders, and this is what he has said: “There is no place for you Jews among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed for annihilation.”

Ahmad Bahar, who is acting chairman of the Gaza Parliament and a member of Hamas said, “Be certain that America is on its way to disappear. Allah take hold of the Jews and their allies. Allah take hold of the Americans and their allies. Allah count them and kill them to the last one, don’t leave even one.”

On the official Hamas website there is a video of a Hamas suicide bomber, and he can be seen saying this: “My message to the Jews is that there is no god but Allah. We are a nation that drinks blood and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood and our children’s thirst with your blood.”

Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, has said that he hopes we Jews will gather in Israel so he won’t have to hunt us down worldwide.

Youssef al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, spoke not long ago to a million people in Tahrir Square and said this: “Throughout history Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler by means of all the things he did to them — even though they exaggerated this issue — he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.” In other words, Islam will finish the job that Hitler started.

The prophet Muhammad has said, “The day of judgment will only come when Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When the Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees and the rocks and the trees cry out ‘Oh, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

This genocidal saying of the prophet is quoted in the Hamas Charter, which also says, “Islam will obliterate Israel as it has others before it.”

On American campuses across this country, members of Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Student Association chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The river is the Jordan, which is Israel’s border to the east; the sea is the Mediterranean, which is Israel’s border to the west. “From the river to the sea” is Israel. What Students for Justice in Palestine and members of the Muslim Students Association are chanting is a statement of intention to obliterate the state of Israel. Israel is fighting for its survival against global forces who want to destroy it.

What is “Palestine?”

It’s not an Arabic name. It’s a name that was given to Judea and Samaria, which is now called the West Bank, and which is the historic homeland of the Jews. In 66 A.D. the Jews had the bad judgment to go up against the Roman Empire, and they were defeated and a million Jews were killed. To further humiliate the Jews of Judea, the Romans renamed the territory they inhabited after their enemies, the Philistines. There were no Arabs, by the way, in this region at that time. The Philistines were red-headed Aegean sailors. They were not Arabs.

For 2000 years after that, there was no people calling itself Palestinian. In fact, there was no people calling itself Palestinian until 1964, 15 years after the state of Israel was created, which is one of the reasons that Newt Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an invented people. Palestine is the name of a region, it’s like New England. In 1948 if you talked about Palestinians, you’d be talking about Jews. We inhabit a kind of surreal universe now, particularly in universities, which are the most conformist institutions in our country, which is why these facts seem strange. The university has become a one-party state where people on the left talk to each other with nobody to challenge them, which is why everything I’m going to say tonight will probably seem strange. But if you can overcome your emotions and actually look at the facts, you’ll see that everything that I’m saying is quite correct.

The, Big Lie which is repeated by Hamas and the PLO, and by everyone on the political Left and by all supporters of the Palestinian cause, is this; the claim that Israel occupies Palestinian land, or that it occupies Arab land.

This is false. The land that Israel was created on, which is the same land that Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan were created on, belonged to the Turks for 400 years prior to that. Turks are not Arabs. The Turks were on the losing side in the First World War, which meant that when the war was over the Ottoman Empire would be dismantled. This is according to both international law and international tradition. After the war, the European victors were given mandates over the conquered empire, and they carved out the five nations I mentioned.

The “Palestine Mandate,” which described a portion of this territory, referred to a region, not a people. There were Arabs living in this region, but there was no “Palestinian people.” In 1922, Churchill assigned 80% of the Palestine Mandate to Jordan, created the state that is now called trans-Jordan. Seventy-percent of the people living in this area were Arabs who inhabited the region called “Palestine.” In other words seventy-percent of Jordan is Palestinian. But you never hear anybody complain that Jordan is “occupied” by the Hashemite minority that rules the state. Jordan is a Hashemite monarchy with a majority Palestinian population. It is 80% of the land mass of the original Palestine Mandate. Where is the movement for the self-determination of the Palestinians of Jordan? There is none. There is none because the agenda of the Palestinians and their leftwing supporters is not to create a Palestinian state but to push the Jews into the sea. That’s it. The Palestinian movement is not about self-determination.

[At this point about 40 members of the audience, some wearing kaffiyeh’s the terrorist symbol created by Yassir Arafat, most of them members of the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine, supporters of Hamas marched out on a pre-arranged cue.]

Goodbye everybody. These are supposed to be college students, supposed to be learning…

The British government, which created the state of Jordan (or Trans-Jordan as it was then known), stipulated that no Jew could own land in Jordan. Today, no Jew is welcome in Jordan, a country which occupies 80% of the Palestine Mandate that had been promised to the Jews.

The British and the United Nations then divided the remaining 20% of the original Palestine Mandate between the Jews and the Arabs, who lived on the west bank of the Jordan River, the Arabs who – it so happened – lived in Judea and Samaria, the historic homeland of the Jews. They divided the remaining 20% equally, except that they gave the Jews three slivers of land not exactly contiguous and 60% of that land was an arid desert.

The Arabs rejected their share of the land and instead, on the day Israel was created in 1948, eight Arab dictatorships attacked the new born state with the stated intention of pushing the Jews into the sea. That war has never ended. It is the Arabs’ aggression against the state of Israel and their desire to push the Jews into the sea that is the cause – the sole cause – of the conflict in the Middle East.

When the Jews won the 1948 war, they offered to sign a peace with the Arabs and to live side by side with an Arab state. But the Arabs did not want a Palestinian state, then or for the next sixty years. They have rejected a state every time it has been offered to them because that is not their goal. Their goal was once to expel a non-Arab people from the region, and is now to make it Muslim. Islam is – and has always been — an imperial religion that expands by force. No one can leave Islam. For apostates the sentence is death. Similarly, once an area is Muslim, it has to stay Muslim. That is the creed.

When the war ended in 1949, Egypt annexed Gaza, and Jordan annexed the West Bank. There was not a peep out of the entire Arab world about the annexation of Gaza or the annexation of Jordan, or the fact that the so-called Palestinians not only didn’t have a home now, they didn’t have the land they had been promised to build on. Why was there no protest? Because it’s not about self-determination for the Palestinians or the Arabs, for that matter. It’s about getting rid of the Jews. It’s about pushing the Jews into the sea.

The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, was an admirer of Hitler who translated “Mein Kampf” into Arabic in the ‘30s. In 1948, al-Banna said, “If the Jews get a state in Israel, Islam will push the Jews into the sea.” That’s the agenda, and it has never changed.

In 1964, when the West Bank was still part of Jordan, and Gaza was still part of Egypt, the Egyptian dictator, Nasser, sponsored the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization as a weapon against the Jews. You can read the original PLO charter on the Internet. You will not find a word about liberating the Palestinians of the West Bank, or about self-determination for Palestinians of Gaza. It’s all about obliterating the Zionists — Israel. That’s who these people are.

The West Bank and Gaza were liberated from Egypt and Jordan as a result of Israel’s victory in the ’67 war. This was the second Arab aggression in 20 years whose stated purpose was to destroy the Jewish state. When this war was ended, Israel offered to return Gaza and Jordan back to Arab rule in exchange for a peace treaty that would recognize Israel’s right to exist. The offer was rejected. The Arab aggressors all met in Khartoum in 1967 and they issued a joint statement which is generally referred to as “The Three No’s” – “No recognition of Israel; No negotiation; No peace.” That is the reason why Israeli troops have occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Their purpose is to prevent further aggressions by the Arab states through these corridors, and also – and more recently — their use as terrorist launching pads by the PLO and Hamas — and that’s why Israeli troops are stationed here.

Israel cannot just unilaterally withdraw from where its troops are stationed and allow those who seek its destruction to attack again. They need to have a peace treaty that recognizes their right to exist and they need to redraw their borders to make their territory more defensible. It is the internationally recognized procedure for dealing with aggressors when they lose to re-draw the map so that their victims have a greater ability to defend themselves the next time.

Germany attacked Poland twice in the 20th century, so in 1945 the Allies took the entire region of East Prussia, which was the industrial heartland of Germany, and gave it to Poland.

How many Germans do you think had to be resettled? How many Germans did they pull out of East Prussia and resettle when the Allies gave East Prussia? Twelve million. Twelve million Germans were uprooted from places they had inhabited since the Middle Ages. And nobody complained. If the Jews had acted the way other nations act, they would have annexed the West Bank in 1967 and they would have moved all the Arabs into Jordan which is a majority Palestinian state. But they didn’t do that. The Jews tried to be nice. They thought: if we’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to us. No they won’t. They hate you, and want to push you into the sea.

When Israel was the ruling authority in the West Bank and Gaza in the ‘70s and ‘80s, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into these territories and created universities. The economy of the West Bank grew at a rate that was the fifth fastest in the world. Then came the Oslo so-called peace process, which established the Palestinian Authority and brought the terrorist Arafat back from Tunisia and gave him control. I had to pinch myself when I read the statistics, but within six months the standard of living in Gaza had declined by 25% and the unemployment rate went from 10 to 40%. These are the real oppressors of Palestinians: The PLO and Hamas.

It’s not like the malicious intent towards the Jews, the hatred for the Jews, the “kill the Jews” mentality is extraneous to this struggle. It is this struggle. The father of Palestinian nationalism is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who led massacres of the Jews in the ‘20s and ‘30s because they were Jews – well before the creation of the state of Israel. Al-Husseini was a Nazi, literally a Nazi, who went to Berlin to serve Hitler. Al-Husseini was a protégé of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He recruited an Arab legion to fight for Hitler and he also drew up his own plans to create an Auschwitz – a death camp for Jews in the Middle East. The only reason his plan wasn’t implemented was because Rommel was defeated in the battle of El Alamein. Today, Al-Husseini is honored on the West Bank with a holiday as the George Washington of the Palestinians.

This is a Nazi movement. The statements I read at the outset of this talk are Nazi statements. The difference is this: Hitler hid his plans for the Final Solution from the German people because he thought they were too civilized to accept them. The Palestinians of Hamas and the Iranians shout it from the rooftops. Where is the great dissent from this in the Muslim world? It’s too bad that all our Muslim friends have left and did not stay to hear this, but there are good Muslims and there are bad Muslims, and the majority of Muslims are probably good Muslims – decent, law abiding and desiring peace. But there were good Germans too, and in the end, they didn’t make a damn’s worth of difference. I will know a moderate Muslim when they stand up and condemn these kinds of statements and the actions that they inspire. It’s not really hard to know who your friends are. But a lot of people have difficulty in knowing who their enemies are and that is the problem we are facing today.

Since Gaza for the younger people here is something they remember, I will use Gaza to make this case. After the 1967 war, as I said previously, the Jews offered to give Gaza back to Egypt. Egypt rejected the offer because the Arabs had decided on the “Three No’s” — no negotiation, no recognition, no peace. The reason that Israeli troops occupied Gaza was that Israel had been invaded twice already – and in 1973 would be attacked for a third time. Nonetheless, the world is bent on encouraging Arab aggressions. There was enormous international pressure from the left on Israel to retreat from Gaza without a peace, without security guarantees.

Why is there such international pressure? It comes from Islamic states, but also from the secular international left, which regards Israel as the oppressor and not only ignores the history of Arab aggression but also the real oppression in the Muslim world. The left is supposed to care about women and gays, but apparently not when they are second class citizens or hung from cranes in Islamic countries. There is no greater oppressor of women in the world today than Islam.

Women are practically chattel in many Islamic countries and are not even free to go out without a chaperon. Ninety percent of the women of Egypt have their clitorises sliced off in accordance with Muslim practice, and most of these clitoridectomies are done without anesthetic on pubescent girls with kitchen knives. Where is the outrage? What is the Women’s Studies Department on this campus saying about that?

In any case, in 2005 or so, Ariel Sharon decided that Israel would unilaterally withdraw from Gaza and take away an argument against the Jewish state. Remove a Jewish “settlement.” There were 7500 Jews in Gaza at the time. Why are Jewish settlements a problem in any case? There are more than a million Palestinian Arabs settled in Israel. What’s wrong with Jews living in the West Bank? It’s a problem because the Palestinians are racist. They hate Jews and they don’t want any Jews living in their society. How do I know this? Because Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the PLO, has said so, and in so many words: there are not going to be any Jews in a “liberated” Palestine. How much clearer does it have to get? (And yet, there is not a Jewish organization on this campus willing to support this talk.)

So, Ariel Sharon decided, “We’re going to unilaterally withdraw.” Of course, Jews don’t want to be occupiers in any case. Why should they? They’re too busy creating cell phones and flash drives. Israel is the most creative, productive society on the face of the earth. Which is another reason why the Arabs hate it. Hate Israel. Israel’s creativity and productivity because it shows how Islam as currently interpreted has blighted the Arab world. There are three hundred million Arab Muslims in the Middle East. There are five million Finns in Finland. If you take away the oil that God in one of his blacker moments put under the desert there; if you take away the oil, the gross national product of three hundred million Arabs is less than that of five million Finns. And why is that? Well, part of the reason, obviously, is that they keep their women ignorant, denying them education. One of the reasons the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the ayatollahs was because he allowed women to get an education. The ayatollahs didn’t like that. The illiteracy rates in the Muslim world are a disgrace. It’s no wonder their countries are so backward.

In any case, Ariel Sharon decided that Israel was going to remove the Gaza pretext for the Palestinians not to sign a peace treaty. But he misread the Palestinians’ intentions. Israel evacuated Gaza unilaterally. The Israeli government also evacuated the 7,500 Jews who had settled there and did not want to leave. Because they did not want to leave, the Israeli government forcibly removed them. Why did they do that? Because if they had not done that, the Jews living in Gaza would have been massacred when the Israeli troops left. Figuring out the Middle East conflict does not take rocket science. What did those Jewish settlers do? Well, first of all, they were law-abiding. They were 7,500 Jews living peacefully among more than a million Arabs. They were not only law-abiding citizens of Gaza, they were productive ones. The 7,500 Jews created a horticulture industry with greenhouses and irrigation systems. They produced 10% of the entire gross national product of Gaza, a country that could not afford to take such a contribution lightly.

If I may be self-critical about my own people, this is how sappy we Jews are. To make the Israeli peace gesture to the Palestinians complete, to put the ribbons on it, so to speak, the Jewish publisher of U.S. News & World Report collected 14 million dollars from Jewish philanthropists to buy the greenhouses and give them with the irrigation systems to the Palestinians of Gaza. On the day the Israeli troops left and Hamas took control of Gaza, Hamas destroyed the greenhouses and the irrigation systems – the whole industry that had accounted for ten percent of Gaza’s gross national product — and started firing rockets into schoolyards in Sderot.

Eight-thousand rockets have been fired into Israel since Israel foolishly withdrew from Gaza. And what kind of rockets are they? They’re not rockets that one targets a military instillation with. They can’t target accurately. They aren’t good for any military purposes. They are only good for terrorizing civilians. These are Nazis. That’s who they are. And yet, on college campuses we have people wringing their hands over the poor Gazans because after three years of Israel accepting the unacceptable Israel struck back. Just how long do you think a country like America would allow, say, Canada, to launch rockets into schoolyards and towns in this country with no reprisal? But the Jews did it for three years. And then when they struck back, on college campuses across the country to protest the deaths of civilians who were killed in the Israeli effort to stop the attacks. Why were so many Gazans killed in the counter-attack? Because Hamas put them in harm’s way. Hamas put its headquarters under a hospital. Hamas installed its rockets in neighborhoods where people lived. You wouldn’t think there would be so many idiots in the West who would fall for these tactics, but there are.

Geopolitically speaking, Israel is in pretty dire straits. Iran is a thousand miles away; Israel does not have strategic bombers, it has fighter bombers. Whether they can actually carry out the job of taking out Iran’s nuclear capabilities is problematic. Of course, if you believe that Iran is building these nuclear sites to produce medical isotopes I’m not goin’ to get through to you. Israel is in a very hard place. A significant portion of its plight, is its own doing – not reading the intentions of its enemies. Leaving Gaza to Hamas was one mistake. The Oslo peace process was another. When Oslo began, the terrorist Yassir Arafat was in exile in Tunisia. For the sake of peace with people who wanted to push them into the sea, the Jews brought Arafat back to Ramallah, and armed his terrorist “police force” with 40-thousand weapons, and in effect began the phase of the war in which Hamas Nazis are dictating the tactics – suicide bombing in particular.

Why do people fall for these illusions? Its the “hopey-changey” thing in all of us. The wish is father to the thought. We want things to be better; we don’t want to face the fact that there is evil in this world. People don’t want to hear that there is evil.

On our college campuses today you can’t even inform people of what’s out there. My Freedom Center has produced a pamphlet written by Dan Greenfield about Muslim hate groups on campuses, which refers to the anti-Israel activities of the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine. I tried to place an ad for that pamphlet in about 30 college papers. Only one, Ohio State, agreed to print it – this is a paid advertisement mind you. Of course, there was a big eruption when it appeared. The Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine are Muslim Brotherhood groups, which make apologies for Palestinians’ evil intentions and deeds, and demonize Israel by spreading Hamas and PLO lies about the Jewish state.

Oh, of course on a college campus you can’t talk about Palestinians having evil intentions. That’s a generalization. You can’t say all Palestinians, that’s racist. All right, where is the Palestinian “Peace Now”? Tell me that. Where is the Palestinian standing up in the West Bank or Gaza, or in the United States, for the rights of Jews? There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Jews who are standing up for the rights of Palestinians. But none known to me refuting the lie that Israel is an apartheid state. It’s all about intentions. It’s all about the culture. And Palestine is a culture of hate.

Tell me that the reason the Palestinians in their majorities, through their governments support suicide bombers is because they are desperate. The Israelis have tanks, we have suicide bombers. The fact is that people have been oppressed in this world for thousands of years, horribly oppressed. But never in the entire history of mankind has an oppressed people strapped bombs on its own children and sent them to blow themselves up and kill other children, and then tells them that if they’re lucky enough to be male, they’re going to go to heaven and get 72 virgins for their good deed. That is sick. Gaza is a death cult, and the death cult is created by Hamas. A similar death cult exists in the West Bank run by Hamas’s ally, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which lionizes the murderers of children, terrorists who actually set out to target children. Who does this except psychopaths? They have institutionalized psychopathic behavior. You can see it on the web, the preachers preaching death to Jews, the little kids dressed up as suicide bombers, the children’s television cartoon figures encouraging them to murder Jews.

There was a really good documentary on HBO called “A Death in Gaza,” made by liberals, which was about this death cult. The filmmakers followed two twelve-year-old boys who who were hanging around Hamas, and aspiring to be suicide bombers. They recited poems in their school classes about becoming suicide bombers. It was a very sad picture. During the film one of the kids was shot – I forget the details of the incident – and suddenly he was transformed back into a little kid no longer boasting about becoming a suicide bomber but screaming and crying in pain.

In another sequence one of the boys was playing scissors, rock, paper with a Hamas terrorist. When the kid went back home the filmmaker said to the terrorist, “I see that you use this kid as a runner and lookout. Isn’t that a little dangerous for a 12-year-old? He could get killed.” The terrorist’s answer: “Oh, we have thousands of kids like that we can replace him with.”

At the end of the film, the director is killed. Nobody knows who killed him. He is out in the field and is shot. The film ends with a sequence with the kids. After they come through the terrible experience of one of them being wounded and in pain, the filmmakers ask them what they’d like to be now, and they say, “filmmakers.” That’s how sick that situation is. This is a whole society geared to bringing up its children to kill Jews.

Now why are these campus leftists — I’ve talked to them and they’re not stupid kids — sucked into this, into being apologists for evil? I have some insight into this because I grew up in the Left. My parents were Communists and I was one of the founders of the New Left. I have a fairly educated insight into what might go on in the mind of a leftist and how one of them might be taken with the Palestinian cause. To begin with, there is no right in this cause. The Palestinian cause would be right if it were directed against Hamas and Hezbollah and the PLO and the Arab states. Then it would be supportable. But, it is led by Hamas and Hezbollah and the PLO and is directed against the Jews who are the victims of a 60-year war by the Arab states and the Palestinian authorities to push them into the sea, and obliterate the Jewish state.

“Push the Jews Into the Sea” was the official slogan of the Palestinian Liberation Organization until the KGB persuaded Yassir Arafat that the Palestinians would never gain influence with the international community unless they changed the face of their movement and presented it as a quest for self-determination. (We know this from the testimony of Arafat’s KGB handler, Ian Pacepa.) Of course, for anyone familiar with the facts this is an obvious lie since the population of Jordan is 60% to 70% Palestinian Arab but is ruled by Hashemites. There is no outcry over the oppression of the Palestinians of Jordan by the Hashemites and no movement for Palestinian self-determination in Jordan.

It is also evident in the repeated rejections of statehood by the Palestinians every time it is offered to them. In 2000 Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians 95% of the territory they had been demanding to create a state and their response was the Second Intifada led by suicide bombers targeting pizza parlors and public buses.

Why would the left embrace such a malignant cause? Because the left is seduced by promises to “liberate” and to change the world. The world is full of misery, everywhere one looks. If the world could be changed, who wouldn’t want to do it? But, consider the legacy of the movements that actually set out to change the world in the 20th century.

Nazism was one. If we just rid the world of the Jews and the mongrel races, we can create heaven on earth. Communism was another. If we just get rid of the capitalists – the 1% — we can create paradise on earth. What Communist progressives created in fact was the most oppressive state in the history of the world. In the name of “social justice” they murdered 120 million people — in peace-time – and created unimaginable poverty, man-made famines that killed millions of people. That’s what progressives produce when they get sufficient power.

The lesson of this is that you can only change the world a little piece at a time. There’s a reason that we are where we are and not somewhere else. The obstacle to the realization of all progressive utopias is human nature. You can read all of the Marxist and leftist texts ever written and never encounter a consideration of what people are actually made of and what they are capable of, and why it is so difficult to produce a society of human beings that is fundamentally different from the way human beings have lived since the beginning of recorded time. But the fantasy persists: we’re going to change the world. It’s the same fantasy of Osama bin Laden and the jihadists: We’ll make everybody Muslim and force them to live under Sharia law, and then the world will be a holy place. And if you don’t agree to be holy, we’ll kill you. Exactly the mentality of the Nazis and the Communists.

There’s a natural affinity between all movements for an earthly redemption. That’s why the Islamists have made common cause with the progressive left and have learned to talk in the language of the of the left, the totalitarian language of social justice. It’s a noble idea, but it is an impossible dream.

I have come to these conclusions having spent the first half of my life trying to achieve social justice and then reflecting on the achievements of the movements I supported. I was part of the so-called anti-war left of the ‘60s. (The left is never “anti-war” – it is anti-American, anti-capitalist war.) The left I was part of forced America to get out of Vietnam – to withdraw unilaterally from the field of battle. The Nixon supporters of the war whom we hated said, “If America leaves Indo-China, there will be a bloodbath. The Communists will kill thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe more.” Our answer was, “No, they won’t.” But they did. They killed two-and-a-half million people in one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. And there wasn’t one leftist protest against those killings – because they were done by Communists, by progressives.

David Horowitz was one of the founders of the New Left in the 1960s and an editor of its largest magazine,Ramparts. He is the author, with Peter Collier, of three best selling dynastic biographies: The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976); The Kennedys: An American Dream (1984); and The Fords: An American Epic (1987). Looking back in anger at their days in the New Left, he and Collier wrote Destructive Generation (1989), a chronicle of their second thoughts about the 60s that has been compared to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and other classic works documenting a break from totalitarianism. Horowitz examined this subject more closely in Radical Son (1996), a memoir tracing his odyssey from “red-diaper baby” to conservative activist that George Gilder described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.”Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/03/23/the-war-against-the-jews-of-the-middle-east/

Many people have been carried away by the idea that the international community is facing one of two choices: either accepting the Syrian regime or risking civil war breaking out in Syria, which in turn could ignite regional wars. This intimidation has succeeded in changing the views of some foreign and Arab governments and leaders, since last November, when the Arab League withdrew from its intention to suspend Syria’s membership; a decision which had previously been almost unanimously agreed upon by the Arab League member states, with just two countries opposing this.

This great deception, namely that protecting the al-Assad regime protects Syria as a whole, as well as regional stability, is being propagated whilst the reality is the complete opposite. Over the past ten years, Damascus has played the role of the saboteur in our region, masterminding the assassination of dozens of Lebanese leaders, whilst the majority of terrorists who have entered Iraq – carrying out numerous attacks which have resulted in as many as 200,000 people being killed – did so via the Syrian border. Damascus also strongly allied itself with Iran and certain dangerous armed organizations, such as Hezbollah, in order to destabilize the security in our region. In this case, how can al-Assad’s departure lead to chaos, when he is the main source of violence?

It is true that the domestic situation in Syria was previously quite stable due to the regime’s control of all aspects of its citizens’ lives, via its almost 700,000 security and military personnel. This was the true secret of Syria’s “stability”, but now after the outbreak of the revolution throughout Syria, how can the regime’s survival represent a guarantee against civil war? Indeed, this regime itself is carrying out a civil war against the Syrian people; how can this regime hope to co-exist with 25 million Syrians who now consider it their enemy and regard its troops as occupiers, particularly after the violent crackdown, widespread killing and mass detentions?

It is a delusion to believe that backing al-Assad will prevent the outbreak of a civil war because the Syrian regime will remain besieged, whilst rebel groups will grow stronger and continue to attack the regime in the coming years. Let us recall what happened to the Saddam Hussein regime after his forces were broken in 1991. The regime remained in control in Baghdad, but most of the country suffered chaos and rebellion. The central authority was unable to control the rest of the country; practically speaking, Saddam was in charge during the day, while militias and gangs were in control by night. Accordingly, the regime collapsed quickly in 2003, when US troops were able to easily over-run the country and occupy it within just a few days.

Therefore defending the Syrian regime and believing that its presence will guarantee regional stability is nothing more than a delusion. It was not a guarantor of regional stability in the past, nor will it be in the future. Moreover, failing to take any action against al-Assad – who is massacring his own people – in the belief that this will prevent the outbreak of a civil war will, ironically, guarantees the outbreak of said war. Due to the policy of intimidation being utilized by the al-Assad regime, and which has also been adopted by groups in Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Egypt and Algeria; al-Assad is disregarding all efforts, mediation and means of resolving this crisis. Whilst protests and killings are taking place across Syria, al-Assad is spending hours on his computer downloading movies via the internet. If this regime remains in power, it will only do so by relying even more on a axis of terror managed by Iran. Al-Assad’s leaked emails already clearly show how the Iranians are directing him, even in the manner that he writes his own press statements!

The fall of al-Assad will certainly have painful consequences; however these are nothing in comparison with the danger of this regime remaining in power, particularly after it has committed these terrible crimes. If the al-Assad regime survives, it will pose an even greater threat to its closest neighbours; namely Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. It will become a safe haven for regional terror groups, whilst the whole region will be drowned in wars masterminded by Iran and managed by the al-Assad regime, which has experience in this field dating back to the seventies. The al-Assad regime has managed armed groups for four decades, during which their activities covered most countries in the Middle East and even reached Europe.

Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed is the general manager of Al -Arabiya television. Mr. Al Rashed is also the former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al- Awsat, and the leading Arabic weekly magazine, Al Majalla.

Are They Going To Be Dumb Enough to Give More?The $7 billion that has been invested in the Gaza Strip has, ironically, helped Hamas to solidify its control over the area.

The Palestinian Authority announced this week that it has spent nearly $7 billion on the Gaza Strip since 2007, when Hamas violently seized control of the regional coast. This means that since 2007, according to Fatah spokesman Ahmed Assaf, about $120 million has been going to the Gaza Strip. He revealed that the Palestinian Authority continues to pay salaries to some 80,000 "civil servants" in there-- but he did not elaborate on the nature of their work.

The West Bank's Palestinian Authority government, headed by Salam Fayyad, has appealed to the donor countries to increase the financial aid to strengthen the Palestinian economy, especially in the Gaza Strip. But before the donors take any decision, they really should ask Fayyad and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas about the $7 billion they have already spent on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip over the past four years: Where is it?

These revelations came on the eve of a meeting of donor countries in Brussels to discuss financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. The $7 billion that has been invested in the Gaza Strip by the Palestinian Authority has, ironically, helped Hamas solidify its control over the area. In other words, Fayyad and Abbas are funding their rivals in Hamas who terrorized them out of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. The Palestinian Authority is continuing to spend millions of dollars on the Gaza Strip at a time when its leaders are not even permitted to visit there; Mahmoud Abbas cannot even visit his home in Gaza.

The billions of dollars that the Palestinian Authority claims its has spent over the past five years, all from Europe and the United States, should have transformed the Gaza Strip into the Middle East's Singapore. These huge funds should have ended the suffering of the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip. But despite all billions of dollars that have been poured into the area, the Gaza Strip remains a base for jihadists and various terror groups. As bad, the funds have done virtually nothing to solve the severe problem of unemployment and poverty in the Gaza Strip.

The donors, for example, have the right -- as well as the fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers of Europe whose hard work was what bankrolled this transfer of wealth -- to know which "civil servants" in the Gaza Strip receive salaries, and if they include members of Hamas's security forces. Even more urgently needed is for the donors should check on whether some of the money is being used to finance the manufacturing of rockets and missiles and the purchase of weapons from Iran, Sudan and Egypt.

These billions are not only helping Hamas to stay in power, they are absolving Hamas of its responsibilities as the ruling government to be able to take care of its constituents. The Europeans, the American and the Palestinian Authority are also wrong if it thinks that the funds will have a moderating effect on the residents of the Gaza Strip. The people there will take the money from the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank, but at the end of the day they will still vote for Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

The donor countries really must insist that the Palestinian Authority reconsider its policy of facilitating Hamas's continued control over the Gaza Strip. And they need to make sure that their money is not ending up in the hands of terror cells and armed groups.

Livingstone's appeal to Muslims may, on May 3, propel him into the mayor's office. Either way, London appears headed for an Islamic future.

Ken Livingstone, the British Labour Party's candidate for mayor of London, says he wants to turn the capital city into a "beacon" of Islam.

Speaking to Muslim worshippers on March 16 at the North London Central Mosque, one of the most hardline mosques in Europe, Livingstone pledged that if elected, he would "educate the mass of Londoners" about Islam.

Livingstone, a self-described socialist who previously served as the mayor of London from 2000 to 2008, declared: "I want to spend the next four years making sure that every non-Muslim in London knows and understands [Mohammed's] words and message. That will help to cement our city as a beacon that demonstrates the meaning of the words of the Prophet."

Livingstone's electioneering tactic may earn him the support of Muslim voters in London. But by speaking at the North London mosque, Livingstone has also succeeded in reviving long-standing suspicions that he is closely linked to Islamic fundamentalists.

The North London Central Mosque, also known as the Finsbury Park Mosque, has a well-established reputation for being a center for radical Islamism in Britain. The mosque was once controlled by Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian jihadist who is now in prison in Britain for "instigation to acts of terrorism." The Finsbury Mosque is currently being run by the Muslim Association of Britain, an Islamist organization tied to the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

One of Livingstone's main links to radical Islam is through an organization called the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), an Islamist group dedicated to changing the "very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed … from ignorance to Islam."

The IFE is especially active in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets. Also known as "The Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets," the area is brimming with extremist Muslim preachers, the Tower Hamlets' Taliban, who are seeking to impose Islamic Sharia law on large swaths of the British capital.

The Tower Hamlets' Taliban regularly issue death threats to women who refuse to wear Islamic veils. Neighborhood streets have been plastered with bright yellow posters declaring "You are entering a Sharia controlled zone: Islamic rules enforced." And street advertising deemed offensive to Muslims is regularly vandalized or blacked out with spray paint.

In 2010, Livingstone campaigned against his own party's candidate to back a Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant named Lutfur Rahman to become the mayor of Tower Hamlets. Rahman, known to be linked to Islamic jihadists, has dedicated much of his time as mayor to diverting public money to the IFE, and to stocking public libraries in Tower Hamlets with books and DVDs containing the extremist speeches of banned Islamist preachers.

Livingstone's ties to IFE began in 2004 when, as the mayor of London, he ordered the London Development Agency (LDA) to channel hundreds of thousands of pounds to the East London Mosque in Tower Hamlets for a new headquarters for the IFE. In return, IFE activists campaigned for Livingstone during the 2008 mayoral elections -- which he ended up losing by fewer than 150,000 votes -- by getting out the vote and achieving dramatic gains for him in Tower Hamlets and neighboring Newham.

Livingstone's friend Rahman is also a close ally of Anjem Choudary, a Sharia court judge based in London who believes in the primacy of Islam over all other faiths, and who has long campaigned for Islamic law to be implemented in all of Britain.

In July 2011, a Choudary-led extremist group called Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities -- including what it called "Londonistan" -- into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence.

The campaign, known as the Islamic Emirates Project, named the British cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Derby, Dewsbury, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Sheffield, as well as Waltham Forest in northeast London and Tower Hamlets as territories to be targeted for blanket Sharia rule.

The project, which used the motto "The end of man-made law, and the start of Sharia law," was launched exactly six years after Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured 800 others in London. A July 7, 2011 announcement posted by Muslims Against the Crusades, which has since been banned by the British government, stated:

"In the last 50 years, the United Kingdom has transformed beyond recognition. What was once a predominantly Christian country has now been overwhelmed by a rising Muslim population, which seeks to preserve its Islamic identity, and protect itself from the satanic values of the tyrannical British government."

"There are now over 2.8 million Muslims living in the United Kingdom -- which is a staggering 5% of the population -- but in truth, it is more than just numbers, indeed the entire infrastructure of Britain is changing; Mosques, Islamic Schools, Sharia Courts and Muslim owned businesses, have now become an integral part of the British landscape.

"In light of this glaring fact, Muslims Against Crusades have decided to launch 'The Islamic Emirates Project,' that will see high profile campaigns launch in Muslim enclaves all over Britain, with the objective to gradually transform Muslim communities into Islamic Emirates operating under Sharia law.

"With several Islamic emirates already well-established across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, including Iraq and Afghanistan, we see this as a radical, but very realistic step in the heart of Western Europe, that will Insha'Allah (God willing), pave the way for the worldwide domination of Islam."

According to a recent Ipsos MORI poll conducted for the BBC, Livingstone's main rival, the incumbent mayor Boris Johnson, holds a slight lead but is in a statistical dead heat. With an estimated one million Muslims living in London, Livingstone's appeal to Islam may, on May 3, propel him into the mayor's office. Either way, London appears headed for an Islamic future.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.

When foreign policy “realists,” pseudo-realists, and leftists claim that the pro-Israel establishment is preventing an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, their argument fails to account for one aspect of recent Mideast history: During the administrations of American presidents seen as favoring Israel, the Jewish state’s leaders made serious offers for a final-status agreement.

So the argument that more “daylight” is needed between the U.S. and Israel is generally met with proper skepticism. So is the declaration that President Obama is just as pro-Israel as his predecessors, he’s just showing his friends a bit of tough love–heavy on the tough, light on the love. Aaron David Miller, part of Bill Clinton’s Mideast negotiating team, doesn’t think there’s any reason to fool yourself about that last point. He has written an article for Foreign Policy’s website detailing the six most damaging myths of the U.S.-Israel relationship. No. 6 is: “Barack Obama is just as pro-Israel as Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.” Miller writes:

There’s no question that Obama understands and appreciates the special relationship between Israel and the United States. But Obama isn’t Bill Clinton or George W. Bush when it comes to Israel — not even close. These guys were frustrated by Israeli prime ministers too, but they also were moved and enamored by them (Clinton by Yitzhak Rabin, Bush by Ariel Sharon). They had instinctive, heartfelt empathy for the idea of Israel’s story, and as a consequence they could make allowances at times for Israel’s behavior even when it clashed with their own policy goals. Obama is more like George H.W. Bush when it comes to Israel, but without the strategy…

If Obama had a chance to reset the U.S.-Israel relationship and make it a little less special, he probably would. But I guess that’s the point: He probably won’t have the chance.

Miller has made this point before. And when he says “He probably won’t have the chance,” that’s because the American public and their representatives in the Congress don’t want to downgrade the U.S.-Israeli relationship, so they will work to prevent Obama from doing so. The problem for the president is that he cannot argue that his way is more effective—he thus far has moved the parties in the conflict further away from where they’ve been in the past—or that he is the victim. After all, even Clinton—who never hid his disdain for Benjamin Netanyahu–got Netanyahu to sign a deal, and with Yasser Arafat no less.

Under the previous two administrations—one Democratic, one Republican–the Israeli right, left, and center have all signed agreements, made final-status offers, or led Israel to make unprecedented sacrifices for the peace process. As Yossi Klein Halevi wrote recently: “Israelis still recall with disbelief how Obama refused to honor Bush’s written commitment to Ariel Sharon—that the U.S. would support settlement blocs being incorporated into Israel proper. And never has an American president treated an Israeli prime minister with such shabbiness as Obama has treated Netanyahu. Indeed one gets the impression that of all the world’s leaders, Obama most detests the prime minister of Israel.”

Read that last sentence again and understand why it matters that Obama thinks less of Israel than his predecessors did, and why he has failed both the Israelis and the Palestinians because of it.

The French law is religion-neutral; it refers only to generic “face coverings,” not to any particular religion. The French law imposed a fine of 150 euros ($190) and/or a citizenship course as punishment for wearing a face-covering veil. Forcing a woman to wear a niqab or a burqa became punishable by a year in prison or a 15,000 euro ($19,000) fine.

Immediately, al-Qaida threatened a terrorist action in France. Specifically, al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb (Algeria and Tunisia), warned of an imminent terrorist attack for daring to ban the burqa. Al-Qaida also threatened a Mumbai-like attack somewhere in Europe, most likely in France.

Fortunately, this did not happen.

Fast forward to March 2012, in Toulouse, France.

Between March 11 and March 15, French-Algerian Mohammed Merah murdered three French soldiers who presumably had served in Afghanistan; and on March 19, Merah shot one rabbi and three very young Jewish schoolchildren at a Jewish school in Toulouse. One of the children, 3-year-old Gabriel Sandler, was named after Rabbi Gabriel Hertzberg whom jihadists had tortured and murdered in the Mumbai massacre.

This morning, Merah was surrounded by three hundred French police officers. Calmly and purposefully, Merah called a French radio station and spoke to senior editor Ebba Kalondo.

Merah understood that jihad is also a war of ideas, one which is fought on the radio, on television, with films. In fact, as the police later discovered, Merah had already captured his murder of seven people on video.

According to France’s Channel 24 News, Merah claimed affiliation with al-Qaida in France. He took responsibility for murdering the three French soldiers and four Jews. He then said: His actions were part of a much larger campaign and that further attacks would be carried out in Lyons, Marseilles and Paris in protest against the “ban on the burqa” and the “country’s military presence in Afghanistan.” When asked why he had killed four Jewish people, including three children, he said: “The Jews kill our brothers and sisters in Palestine. … (I) wanted to avenge Palestinian children and take revenge on the French army because of its foreign intervention.”

While others have had many important things to say about Merah’s statements about “Palestine” and Afghanistan, I would like to note that the first thing Mehrah is quoted as protesting is the French “ban on the burqa.”

In the 20th century, the burqa was banned in one Muslim country after the other including Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. For a while, many Muslim women were naked-faced all over the Arab and Muslim world.

Nevertheless, Islamists have opposed bans on face veils and Westernization. They insist that women be face-veiled and that all naked-faced women are whores and fair game for rape and sex slavery. Islamists also insist on polygamy, arranged child arranged marriage, cousin marriage and in honor killing any girl or woman who refuses the veil and all it entails.

Here is an important and little known fact. According to Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby, the history of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is one fraught with ideological splits. Divisions arose “within the Brotherhood’s leadership. It even led to defections from the Brotherhood and the founding of alternative groups. One such group assassinated Sadat. As later interviews with the conspirators revealed, they undertook their plot not only or even primarily because of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty which had been signed two years earlier. Rather, they considered work on women’s rights championed by Sadat’s wife, Jihan, an existential threat to true Muslim society.”

And so it is. And that may be why the Terrorist of Toulouse mentioned the abolition of the burqa first. Follow the burqa-wearing women: They will invariably lead you to the Islamist terrorist men in their family.

Merah is not a “deranged monster.” He is a political actor. Merah did not want to be taken alive to be questioned about his bomb-making skills, or training in and visits to Afghanistan and Waziristan, Pakistan. Reportedly, after being surrounded by French law enforcement, Merah stormed-out of his bathroom wearing a bulletproof vest and opened rapid fire on the policemen (injuring five), before diving out a window yelling, “Allahu Akbar.” He died from a gun shot to the head.

This is not an isolated instance. Like the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan, and the Times Square would-be bomber, Faisal Shahzad, Merah viewed his actions as part of an Islamic religious-military-political ideology. That ideology is symbolized by the face veil.

There is a link between terrorism and forced veiling. Please bear this in mind before opposing bans on face veils for “religious” reasons.

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is an emerita professor of psychology, a psychotherapist, courtroom witness and the best-selling and influential author of 14 books (“Women and Madness,” “Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman,” “The New Anti-Semitism,” “The Death of Feminism”). She has lived in Afghanistan and Israel, and is currently based in New York City. She may be reached through her website,www.phyllis-chesler.com.

Starting on March 11 and ending on March 19, a terrorist wearing a motorcycle helmet that covered his face conducted a vicious killing spree in Toulouse, France, murdering three French military officers (two of Arab ancestry, one of Caribbean ancestry) and four French Jewish civilians (a 30-year-old Rabbi, his 5-year-old son, his 4-year-old son and an 8-year-old girl). Much speculation as to the possible motives and background of the terrorist followed. On March 21, 2012, the French armed forces surrounded an apartment in Toulouse where the killer lived and released his identity: It was a French Islamist named Mohammed Merah. On March 22, Merah was shot dead while jumping out of his apartment window

What was most disturbing about this terrorist act — aside from its occurrence — was that the elite Western public officials' and media's speculation about the true killer, prior to the discovery of his identity, heavily focused (also here and here and here) on the belief that he was a white European neo-Nazi, or perhaps another Anders Breivik, a white, European Christian killer who hated Islam and may have hated Jews.

Granted, the fact that both French Muslims and French Jews had been killed, and the fact that some neo-Nazis had recently been dismissed from the French military, made this a plausible assumption. But it was not the only possible assumption, and it was almost certainly not the most likely one.

The most likely assumption was what was eventually found to be true — that the killer was a Muslim jihadist who hated Jews and hated those "traitorous" fellow Muslims who served in the "infidel" French army. Indeed, not to toot my own horn, but this was my initial belief. The neo-Nazi Frenchmen who were originally focused on had never been accused of any actual violence against anyone, unlike the actual killer, Mohammed Merah.

Merah had numerous acts of violence on his record along with two short prison terms, in 2007 and 2009. And there was plenty more circumstantial evidence pointing to Merah. He had made two trips to Afghanistan and one to Pakistan — vacationing in a war zone, he claimed — had trained in a jihadist camp in Afghanistan, had been caught planting bombs in Afghanistan in 2007 but escaped from jail in 2008 to return to France, terrorized his French neighbors who in 2010 reported him to the police as a physical threat, was arrested in 2011 during his second trip to Afghanistan and sent back to Toulouse, was under surveillance by French authorities since 2008 for his Islamist beliefs and was even on a U.S. no-fly list. In fact, it turns out that after the first terror attack, Merah was actually placed on a list of possible suspects alongside his older brother Abdelkader, but little was done to trace either of them until after the Jewish school massacre, when the police secured the mobile phone of the first victim, the soldier in Montauban, which showed conversations between him and Merah.

Aside from this evidence, there were other good reasons why the police and observers should have suspected an Islamist killer. Since the 1990s, a large majority of the acts of terrorism in the West have been conducted by Islamic jihadists. This is simply a fact. According to one unscientific count, since 1992 there have been 72 Islamist terrorist attacks on Western targets. Taking a more global view, others cite a number of 18,616 terrorist attacks by jihadists since 9/11. Max Boot says "it is undeniable that the most prominent acts of terrorism in the past several decades have been committed by Islamists, whose ideology has displaced Marxism and even nationalism as the primary propellant for terrorism, as it was in the 1960s-1970s."

Meanwhile, during this same time, there have been very few non-Islamist acts of terrorism. The two most commonly mentioned are the attacks in Oklahoma City in 1995 and in Oslo, Norway in 2011. Breivik, by the way, was not a neo-Nazi, nor a Christian fundamentalist; he was ruled "a paranoid schizophrenic" by a Norwegian court.

Yet, in 2012, when these brutal acts of terrorism occurred in France, the immediate working assumption by the Western elites was that the perpetrator was a neo-Nazi. Let's be very clear about this. We all understand why this delusional thinking occurs — the desire to be politically correct and to not single out a specific religion as producing most of the world's terrorists for the past few decades. But facts are facts, and these PC feelings are dangerous. In the Toulouse case, Mohammed Merah was not even hiding, he was sitting in his apartment because he was "confident that police sought a neo-Nazi." It is even possible that he might have been caught sooner, perhaps prior to the killing of the children, had the French tracked down this terrorist criminal who was well-known to them.

Mohammed Merah, the 23-year-old self-proclaimed member of al-Qaida who was killed after a 30 hour standoff with an elite police tactical unit in Toulouse France was a prime example of a homegrown terrorist. Prior to his violent ending, Merah had admitted to killing at least seven individuals including three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school, as well as three members of the French armed forces. His motive he said was vengeance in the name of Allah.

Just how does a young man, a son of Algerian immigrants, become so full of rage and anger that he thinks killing innocent people pleases God. He was not always like that.

According to a woman who knew him since he was a little child, he moved in a downward spiral to a life of petty crime, including 15 arrests, to prison, and finally to radical Islam.

"He was a normal kid, very cute, with no problems at all," she told a reporter. "But he started to get into trouble – he became a delinquent. Things started to degenerate when he was in his teens. He did some hold-ups of shops, he snatched bags. They sent him to prison before he was even in his twenties. He must have met someone inside who introduced him to radical ideas because when he came out, his mother told me that he was completely changed. She had no idea how to relate to him anymore. His older brother is even more radical and the two of them went off to Afghanistan together..."

And after the shootout with police, French Prosecutor Francois Molins informed reporters that Merah himself told police that he had been radicalized in prison during which time he began to read the Koran.

Islamic radicalization in prison. Where have we heard that before? Last June, I testified at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the subject to the nay-sayings of liberals who complained that we were singling out one religion. The evidence was incontrovertible. According to the New York State Police Vigilance Project report in 2010, almost half of all homegrown terrorists arrested since 9-11 have had some prior contact with the criminal justice system. The Newburgh Four, which included career criminal and ex-con James Cromitie. In 2009, they chose the same types of targets as Mohammed Merah: Jewish religious houses and military personnel. Even Jose Pimental, the pipe bomb builder, had been arrested in 2005 for credit card fraud and served a period of probation.

The NYPD got the threat assessment right five years ago when they issued their findings in a report, Radicalization in the West, The Homegrown Threat. They found that one of the environments where potential terrorists could incubate was prison.

French authorities have known for a time of the cauldron brewing in their correctional system. In the mid-1990s, after an unprecedented campaign of terrorist attacks in Paris, the French government dismantled several Algerian GIA-backed terrorist cells and sentenced both operatives and financiers of the attacks to lengthy prison terms

These anti-terrorism successes created a different set of problems as radical Islamists began proselytizing their views to fellow inmates and recruiting new followers in prisons. Pascal Maihlos, the director of France's domestic intelligence agency, Renseignements Généraux (RG), put it plainly in a 2006 interview with Le Monde: "It is there, in prison, that a minority of radical Islamist terrorists (about 100) hook up with petty criminals who find their way back to religion under its most radical form."

Despite the warnings, an individual like Mohammed Merah was let out to prey on the innocent.

Still there are those who deny the reality of Islamic radicalization in prison. In February, Charles Kurzman, a sociologist from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, published a report "Muslim-American Terrorism in the Decade Since 9/11" for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. In it he said, "Prison does not seem to be a major source of Islamic radicalization."

Oh really? Tell that to the families of the seven victims in France.

The all-too-common path from petty criminal to violent jihadist is a very real threat.

The sooner we recognize this and deal with it effectually the safer society will be.

Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections and author ofThe Fertile Soil of Jihad.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Just as there was a certain segment of the intelligentsia which claimed after 9/11 that the U.S. “had it coming,” so too there will no doubt be some who claim that the Jews somehow had it coming because the Toulouse gunman, Mohammed Merah, cited the plight of the Palestinians along with other issues (e.g., the public ban on the veil in France) to justify his murderous rampage. The best riposte to this despicable line of argument comes from none other than Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who says as Jonathan noted yesterday: “It is time for these criminals to stop marketing their terrorist acts in the name of Palestine and to stop pretending to stand up for the rights of Palestinian children who only ask for a decent life.”

This will not, of course, silence the anti-Israel lobby which will claim that Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza will continue to drive would-be terrorists around the bend until a real Palestinian state is established. The argument, plausible on its face, falls apart at the slightest examination.

Just imagine that Fayyad and his boss, Palestinian Authority President Mohammed Abbas, had actually reached a “final status” deal with the Israelis. I know: it’s hard to imagine but suspend disbelief for a second. No one knows exactly what such a deal would entail but it’s safe to guess that, to be acceptable to any Israeli government, it would have to maintain Israeli sovereignty over much of Jerusalem and the large settlement blocs in the West Bank which are next to Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries. This would mean incorporating perhaps 5% of the West Bank into Israel proper with possible offsets elsewhere. The settlement would also presumably require Palestinians to recognize Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, to agree to live in peace with Israel, and (hardest to swallow) to renounce any right of return. Moreover Israel would probably insist–and rightly so–that any future Palestinian state be prevented from acquiring certain military capabilities (e.g., no anti-aircraft missiles that could shoot down jetliners landing at Ben Gurion Airport) and that Israel maintain some kind of security presence along the border between Jordan and the West Bank. Whatever happens with the Palestinians, the Golan Heights would remain under Israeli control at least pending a deal with Syria, which at the moment seems impossible to imagine.

Again, there is no realistic prospect of such a deal being done anytime soon; there is, for example, the inconvenient fact that Gaza is under the control of Hamas which won’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. But even if such a deal were done and the “peace processers” were to succeed beyond their wildest dreams—even if that were to occur, does anyone imagine that future Mohammed Merahs would react by saying: “I give up my jihad and am reconciled to the state of Israel. The Jews are now my friends.” The thought is absurd. What the Merahs of the world would say instead is: “An apostate regime of traitors has sold out the Palestinian birthright to avaricious sons of apes and I will never accept this sacrilege. The Jews remain my enemies.” In short what the Merahs object to is the existence of the state of Israel under any conditions, not its existence under its post-1967 borders.

To me this is so obvious that it barely needs saying. Yet a significant portion of the foreign policy establishments in the U.S. and Europe still don’t seem to get it. There is nothing wrong with pressing for a Palestinian-Israeli settlement; a deal, if it is a good one, is in the best long term interests of both sides. But no one would should [sic] imagine that any deal will deny extremists the ability to exploit the Palestinian cause to justify their own killer rage at the world in general and Jews in particular.

Mohammad Merah, the self-confessed murderer of Jewish schoolchildren and French soldiers, died while jumping from his bathroom window in a torrent of police gunfire around 11:30 this morning in Toulouse. “This man doesn’t interest me,” Nicole Yardeni, the president of the regional Council of Jews, scoffed after the 32-hour siege had finally ended. “He is only an instrument of death.” But the French press seemed plenty interested. “Itinerary of a killer,” Le Parisien headlined its story over a front-page photo of a smirking Merah. “End of the road for a killer,” L’Humanite trumpeted. “Trajectory of hatred,” Libération blared.

Perhaps it was well that the French had become interested in Merah at last. Although he was on a Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur “watch list” since 2008, no one was apparently watching him.

Claude Guéant, the interior minister, defended the French intelligence agency’s failure by saying it follows “a lot of people engaged in radical Islamism. Expressing ideas and manifesting Salafist opinions is not grounds enough for prosecution,” he explained.

Maybe not, but Merah did more than merely express Salafist opinions. A neighbor in Toulouse filed two police complaints after Merah had tried to recruit her son to jihad by showing him Al Qaeda videos of murders and beheadings, Haaretzreported earlier today. A petty criminal who was known to police for his violent streak from childhood, Merah was radicalized in prison, traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to receive terrorist training at the hands of Al Qaeda, and returned to France determined to kill.

Even when they had Merah cornered, the French authorities did not appear to know what to do with him. After two gunshots were heard from Merah’s apartment shortly before 1:00 in the morning, Guéant wondered aloud if Merah had killed himself. French commandos waited another ten hours, with no communication from Merah, before assaulting his apartment. A special camera was inserted into the apartment, but Merah could not be found. Finally he fired upon them from the balcony and retreated to his bathroom to await them. When the commandos burst in, Merah emerged from the bathroom, firing ferociously, wounding one officer in the foot. Then he dashed back to the bathroom and flung himself from the window.

A columnist for the Telegraph described Merah as a Nike or “Just Do It” terrorist. “[I]ntelligence experts believe al-Qaeda no longer has the organisational capacity to conduct [spectacular] attacks [like 9/11],” Con Coughlin wrote. “Instead they are focusing their energy on softer targets.” Merah may be among the first of a new wave of “lone wolf” terrorists, experts fear.

That’s one fear. My fear is that French powerlessness — the French inability to stop Merah before he murdered Jews and soldiers, the French incompetence at preventing him from writing the last chapter of his own story, going out in a blaze of gunfire, refusing to be taken alive — will only encourage more Islamist terrorists. Whether France has shown that it cannot protect its Jews remains an open question. What France has abundantly demonstrated, however, is that it cannot prevent known Islamists from carrying out terrorist attacks on French soil, nor capture them alive once they have done so.

With shortages of electricity, water, fuel, cooking gas and medicine, a lack of economy and no infrastructure, patience with the Hamas-led government in Gaza is running low.

The chronic fuel shortages have added to the despair of Gaza's 1.6 million people, many of whom blame the government for its failure to resolve the endless crises.

Mohammad al-Abadlah, a member of the gas stations union, says 80 percent of life in Gaza has ground to a halt due to the lack of fuel and electricity. He held the Egyptian government responsible for the shortages.

This view was echoed by an official from the Energy Authority, who said $2 million was sent to Cairo but no fuel has arrived.

The fuel shortages have had a catastrophic effect on daily life. Gazans are enduring daily power cuts of up to 18 hours, hundreds of factories have shut down and even elevators are not working.

Gas station owners say they cannot obtain even a liter of fuel and people are using cooking oil to drive. Others wait in the streets for transport they are lucky to find. Even three-wheel motorbikes are in demand.

The noisy sound of generators can be heard throughout Gaza, day and night, causing several casualties through fires and by their lethal fumes.

Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has tried to calm people down and said Qatar agreed to send cargo ships with fuel via Egyptian ports.

At a press conference Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Mohammad Awad said the crisis was politically motivated by external forces that sought to tighten the siege.

But many Gazans are not satisfied by the government's response, and Hamas' ongoing attempts to blame others for the crisis have only angered people further.

"They only blame the Israeli siege, but what has the government done to solve the problem?" a 32-year-old asked.

"It's the lack of management. It's corruption. If they cannot rule then they should leave office. Sometimes they blame the PA and sometimes the EU and now Egypt," another said.

Sameh, a 23-year-old student, said the government could not expect people's support when it failed to provide for its citizens.

"How do they expect the people's support when they are not providing us with means of steadfastness under Israeli occupation and siege in Gaza?"

"People are not asking for surrender under the siege that is a form of collective punishment but again people's fate is with the hands of the government," said Abu Nidal, an unemployed man.

A recent graduate, also unemployed, said: "Life is unbearable in Gaza. Patience has run out."

"For God's sake, they should know that the people are the source of power and authority. People are not happy under the bad circumstances we are going through, so they should do something or step aside and let someone else rule," said a taxi driver who could not find gas.

A 52-year-old restaurant owner who was forced to close his business said Hamas had disappointed voters who hoped the party would bring reform.

"A lot of Fatah supporters voted for Hamas for reform and change but after six years in power, what happens? Tunnel owners including some Hamas members have became very rich, prices of land and apartments and cars have skyrocketed and they even impose taxes and want to share everything we have."

Discrimination against non-Hamas supporters has reached an unprecedented level, as anyone outside the party finds when applying for a government job, and aid sent to the Palestinian people through convoys is not fairly distributed.

With around 80 percent of Gazan households reliant on food aid provided by international organizations, Hamas' tax hikes have only added to the discontent.

A change in policy could restore the government's popularity, but for many Palestinians -- who feel their needs are sidelined by personal and factional interests -- only national unity will end the crises.

Yousef al-Helou is a freelance journalist from Gaza. He can be reached at al-helou.y@hotmail.com.

Clashes flared across Syria on Thursday, opposition activists said, the day after the UN Security Council had called on all sides to stop fighting and seek a negotiated settlement to the year-long uprising.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the Council's unanimous statement had sent a clear message to Syria to end all violence, but the appeal had little impact on the ground, where rebels are seeking to oust President Bashar Assad.

Opposition sources said Syrian tanks had heavily shelled a large neighborhood in the city of Hama on Thursday after fighting between Free Syrian Army rebels and pro-Assad forces.

The shelling destroyed houses in the Arbaeen neighborhood of northeast Hama, which has been at the forefront of the revolt. Opposition sources said at least 20 people have died in army attacks in the area in the last two days.

It is impossible to verify reports from Syria because the authorities have denied access to independent journalists.

Syrian troops also attempted to storm the northern town of Sermeen on Thursday, killing one man and wounding dozens, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, quoting its network of contacts within Syria.

"Syrian forces are still not able to get inside the town because of fighting but they are shelling Sermeen and using heavy machine guns," said SOHR head Rami Abdelrahman.

Fighting was likewise reported in the central Hama province and the southern city of Deraa, where several soldiers died in an ambush, and loyalist forces conducted raids in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, he added.

The Security Council statement, which was supported by both Russia and China, marking a rare moment of global unity over the crisis, backed a peace drive by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan and warned of "further steps" if Syria failed to respond.

Annan's six-point peace proposal calls for a ceasefire, political dialogue between the government and opposition, and full access for aid agencies. It also says the army should stop using heavy weapons in populated areas and pull troops back.

Firing into Lebanon

While the UN statement, which lacks the legal force of a resolution, talks of the need for political transition in Syria, it does not demand that Assad to step down - something both the rebels and the Arab League have called for.

"In clear and unmistakable terms, the Security Council called for an immediate end to all violence and human rights violations," UN chief Ban said in a speech in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur.

Syria's official news agency appeared to play down the Council statement, saying it contained "no warnings or signals".

At least 8,000 people have died in the revolt, according to UN figures issued a week ago, and diplomats have warned that without a swift resolution, the conflict could spread and degrade already tense sectarian relations across the region.

Underlining the dangers, several Syrian shells landed in the Lebanese border village of al-Qaa and nearby fields late Wednesday, wounding one person, after heavy artillery was heard on the Syrian side of the frontier, residents said.

"More than five shells landed in the fields and in the village," a farmer in al-Qaa told Reuters. Another resident said one shell had detonated next to the main school.

The Human Rights Watch group said on Thursday Syrian security forces were committing "serious abuses" in Qusair, a city in the province of Homs, near the Lebanese border.

"Following their bloody siege of Homs, the Assad forces are applying their same brutal methods in Qusair," said Sarah Leah Whitson, the HRW Middle East director.

"Having seen the devastation inflicted on Homs, the Russian government should stop arms sales to the Syrian government or risk becoming further implicated in human rights violations."

Russia has defended its long-standing military ties with Syria and has said it sees no reason to modify them.

Earlier this week, the New York-based HRW accused opposition forces of committing rights abuses on government troops and their militia allies, including torture and summary execution.

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi told Dutch radio on Monday that 3,000 members of the security forces had died in the uprising, which Damascus blames on terrorist gangs.

Russia hedging bets

Looking to pile pressure on Syria, the European Union is set to impose further sanctions on Assad's inner circle on Friday, including his wife Asma, who described herself as "the real dictator" in an apparently genuine email published by Britain's Guardian newspaper last week.

"Tomorrow we will decide on new sanctions, not only against the Assad regime but also against the people around him," German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle told Deutschlandfunk radio.

He added that the UN statement was an important contribution to solving the crisis in Syria.

"Assad cannot depend on the protective hand of Russia in the violence against his own people and that could accelerate the process of erosion of the regime."

Although Russia has not budged from its main demand that Assad must not be shunted from office by foreign powers, it has adopted a much sterner tone this week, accusing the Syrian leadership of mishandling the crisis.

Analysts say this change of tack is a sign Russia is hedging its bets about Assad's fate and wants as strong a hand as possible in shaping Syria's future should he fall.

"Russia will not be focused on keeping Assad in power for the sake of keeping Assad in power," said Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank.